"...In my experience, a

shopping cart

will never reach its sales targets if it relies solely on search engine placement or pay-per-click advertising to attract business. I recommend setting up a monthly "maintenance" budget. Invest this budget in financing the time and resources required to spread the word about your site and increase your store's web presence.

This is not only an opportunity to add content to your site on a regular basis, which search engines like, but it also allows you to focus your time working on growing your business, instead of working in it.

Here's some things clients have accomplished by allocating a monthly website maintenance budget:

Improving quantity and quality of links on other websites that point to your shopping cart.

An email mailing list and a regular newsletter to subscribers.

Writing articles for sites related to your industry.

Posting on forums of sites related to your industry.

Regular coupon email campaigns.

Launching satellite websites for related product categories.

Distributing shopping cart press releases to online and print media.

Adding outbound RSS feeds to distribute site content.

Adding inbound RSS feeds to add fresh content on related topics to your website.

Add a contact form, knowledgebase and/or message board to solicit communication from customers.

Advertising your shopping cart in web, print and video media.

Partnering with related companies to cross-sell related services on each other's websites.

Add relevant text and other content to all website, product and category pages.

Regularly add articles, hints and tips to the site. Add these as new, separate web pages. A steadily growing website is important for SEO.

Add podcasts to the site on topics relevant to your products or industry.

3-Ways to Team Engagement

Each e-letter will encourage you to take immediate action to implement positive leadership principles. There are a number of activities that will foster an engaged sales force. We will focus on three in this issue.

ONE - The 5-Second Rule

Before you give any input, answer any question or offer coaching, pause for five seconds, and ask yourself; will my reaction support this person in an open, positive way so they can continue to be engaged in our sales efforts?

If your interaction with someone does not promote a positive atmosphere, then chose not to respond for a few seconds until you have organized your thoughts into a positive frame of mind.

It is a lot of fun to be the smartest one in the room, the quickest with the quip or one liner and the one to get the laughs. In many sales organizations we banter quite freely with our staff, exchanging one liners and playful jokes. Is this quick banter creating the sales environment you want to create or simply making you feel good for a few seconds? What is that one-liner or quip costing you in positive performance for your sales team?

Try the five-second rule for a few days. Worse case scenario is that you will get a reputation as a good listener and a reflective person who thinks before s/he speaks. What is your reputation now?

Find tips TWO and THREE on the Custom Sales Training marketing consulting website.

Reprinted with permission by Custom Sales Training

Many webmasters focus on getting more traffic to their web sites. While getting visitors is very important, it is much more important to increase the conversion rate of your web site.

This article will tell you why improving your conversion rate will have a much higher effect on your web site than getting more traffic.

The conversion rate of your web site is the ratio of sales to visitors to your web site. If your web site gets 30,000 visitors per month and 300 of these visitors purchase something from your web site then your conversion rate is 1/100 or 1%.

Scenario 1: Increase your sales by getting more traffic

For example, you could use IBP to improve the search engine rankings of your web site to get more visitors. Or you could run ads on Google AdWords to get 500 additional visitors per day.

That would be 15,000 additional visitors per month and a traffic increase of 50%. You have to invest a lot of time and money to get 50% more traffic. Is it worth it?

Let's say that you sell a product that costs $50. Before increasing the traffic to your web site, you had 300 sales per month = $15,000.

Now that you have 15,000 additional visitors per month, you'll make an additional $7,500 per month (Your conversion rate is 1%. That means that 150 of the 15,000 new visitors will buy the $50 product from you).

That means that you'll earn a total of $22,500 after getting more traffic to your web site.

That's not bad. However, depending on how you got that extra traffic (pay per click, search engine optimization, ads, etc.) you had to pay a lot to get these additional sales.

Scenario 2: Increase your sales by improving your conversion rate

On the Internet, you'll find many articles that explain how to increase the conversion rate of web sites. You have to tweak some web page elements, you have to write good copy, your web site must be clean, visitors must be able to immediately see the benefits, etc.

After some tests, your conversion rate might go up to 3%. Depending on how your web site looked before, this is not hard to do.

Although you still have just 30,000 visitors per month you now make a total of $45,000 per month.

Your new conversion rate is 3%. That means that 900 of the 30,000 visitors will buy the $50 product from you. And you don't have to pay for traffic to get these additional sales.

Do you want $22,500 or $45,000?

It's much easier to increase your conversion rate than to increase your traffic. You can quickly change the contents of your web page and you can quickly test different options on your web pages.

Increase your traffic and you'll earn $22,500. Increase your conversion rate and you'll earn $45,000. To increase the conversion rate of your web pages, you just just to spend some time to learn and to tweak your web pages.

That's where AxROI comes in. AxROI tells you how many of your visitors buy something on your web site and how much they spend on your web site.

If you use AxROI with different landing pages you can quickly find the web page on your web site that delivers the highest conversion rate.

Reprinted with permission under Axandra's publication guidelines.
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